I have mentioned in my previous posts
about the exquisite beauty of Honduras and its people, but have
relayed only in passing some of the great pain present in this place.
This post is a wake up call for anyone thinking that Honduras is a
tropical getaway of palm trees, beautiful trees, and spotless
beaches. Yes there is much beauty in this place and much to praise
God for, but all that is good in Honduras is set against the backdrop
of an exceptionally harsh and cruel world. My goal with this post is
not to be despairing or pessimistic, which those of you know me know
I could never be, but to to simply present from my own experience and
limited knowledge, the plight of the Honduran people. I might also
add that my primary purpose in this post is not to elicit guilty
charity or forced empathy, which often lead to poor action and false
hope, but to simply encourage my readers to see the cares of another
people, loved and cherished by God.
Honduran society is first and
foremost one of profound inequality with a very few people on top
holding most of the money and the vast majority living in abject
poverty beneath them. Poverty as I use the term here is not simply an
indication of monetary value. Poverty in Honduras is not the
struggling college senior working desperately to pay off their
college loans, or the young couple attempting to find a house. No, poverty in Honduras is the uneducated farmer working in the blazing
sun everyday, struggling to get enough money to feed his family. It
is the 5 year old boy playing barefoot in the cracked and trash
ridden streets, stomach extended from malnutrition and body wracked
with a prolonged fever; his name is Tamar and I have held him in my
arms. Poverty here is the scores of aching people that will wait hours, even days, to see a doctor only to be turned away for lacking money to pay for surgery supplies. It is the mother of Alex the fisherman , beaten with a stick by her nephew and forced to go three hours by bus on a bumpy road to a hospital. It is the beggar by the gas station washing his mud-caked clothes in a puddle because he has nowhere else to go. He calls after me as I board the bus, pleading for a bite to eat or a bag of water. In Honduras poverty is every man.
I share these pictures and stories, hard as they are, to illustrate a point; the suffering of the people of Honduras is very real and woefully ignored for the most part by the modern world. Poverty in Honduras is not a geographical phenomena of large cities or suburbs, or a deplorable condition one falls into by debt or unwise economics. No, in Honduras poverty is the common station of life for most of the population. Every physical or economical problem in a society, as any good sociologist or ecologist will tell you,does not exist in a void, but is intrinsically linked to a plethora of associated problems whether societal, governmental, environmental, mental, etc. This is particularly true in the case of Honduras. The fiscal problems Hondurans have are not merely the result of a lack of money to be spent (Though that surely is an issue), but root much deeper in the very way the entire society functions. Like many third-world countries Honduras is rife with corruption, trickling all the way down from government authority skimming money of his employees paycheck to the farmer bribing a guard to allow him to sell drugs. Such gross misuse and abuse of money leads inevitably to imbalance in where the money is going (i.e. fat cats and skinny mice) and how it is being used. Projects that would take a few months in a more stable society, the U.S. for example, may take years in Honduras. Simple infrastructure repair work is often left undone do to lack of funds or corruption along the lines. This lack of action or work in turn leads to greater apathy on the part of the people and less motivation to do work. In this atmosphere of lethargy and inability other problems arise. Depression is a major issue in Honduras followed by massive drug use and homicide levels. Only three years ago a man was murdered at Punta Raótn by a drunkard. The problems here are very livid and real. Every night when I go out to search for turtles I see underage boys smoking and drinking on the beach. Theirs' is a life of hardship. When they can't get a job or go to school, and see little promise for their future, can I really blame them for attempting to drown their sorrows in drugs and liquor?
Another problem exacerbated by the corruption mentioned above and lack of working infrastructure is the sheer amount of trash littering their country. Note that this problem is not unique to Honduras but a growing concern for much of the modern world, even developed countries like the U.S.A. (No matter how hard we try to hide it behind fences or at sea). Everywhere you walk in Honduras you will find plastic. Water bottles, gas tanks, tubs, containers, chip bags, toothbrushes, shoes, anything. As garbage disposal and recycling are expensive and require substantial initial cost and continued cost they are virtually nonexistent in rural Honduras. Even in cities that do have a garbage disposal system recycling is at best rudimentary, consisting of a boy walking behind the truck and removing any plastic coke bottles as they throw them in the bed, and at worst nonexistent. For the majority of Honduras the primary method of trash removal is burning. Virtually every night all across Honduras you can smell smoke the delightful smell of burning plastic and toxic chemicals fill the sky with their aroma. I cannot simply blame the people here for their trash problem, for it is not solely their fault nor do they have any reliable way of addressing the issues. Much of the trash they feed to their fires has English scrawled across the front and large recycling symbols. The irony could not be more poignant. We, the "noble foreigners", in our attempt to aid the poor of Honduras, are polluting the very air they breathe with our plastics and their culture with our rampart materialism. Every Honduran I have met has a love for all things American. The things we wear, the color of our skin, the food we eat, and above all the money we so desperately cling to. Much of the cheap merchandise we throw away will inevitably end up the treasured possession of a Honduran, and eventually a discarded and forgot piece of trash on the beach.
Fast food restaurants, considered the bottom of the totem pole in the U.S.A, are considered excellent cuisine in Honduras. Ornate landscaping surrounds the fully air conditioned, pristine, and shining Wendy's in Tegucigalpa, in sharp contrast to the surrounding slums choking in toxic air. Niño's and niñas wait in eager expectation for the special day that they get to have a junior bacon cheeseburger at Burger King. Little do they realize that just down the road a local street vendor is cooking food fit for a king; native Honduran food, delicious, healthy and direct from the environment that provides it. I will not spend any more time remarking on the problems that the U.S. and the rest of the modern world have inflected on this poor country. Suffice to say, we have done many good things to support the people of Honduras (i.e. charity, money, development programs) but in our attempts of kindness have also brought a wealth of misery on these poor people.
The people of Honduras suffer, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, a plethora of problems and troubles springing from profound economic inequality and societal corruption at ever level. My brief and somewhat biased depiction of these problems, is by no means comprehensive and is sure to contain some errors of which I apologize most profusely. My goal here, to reiterate, is not to judge the Honduran people or anyone else, but to simply explain the plight of the Honduran people as I see it. If I can can see a broken man in the streets washing himself in the mud and not be moved with sorrow and compassion, what kind of Christian am I? Did not Christ die for people such as these?
A typical Honduran House
